Tips on how to stay focused with your marketing approach when the industry is constantly shifting.

One of the hardest tasks for marketers in the 21st Century is to stay the course. Here are some ideas that can help you ignore hype and push pause on constantly shifting ideas.

Picture this. You worked tirelessly on a new marketing strategy. You’ve started to implement your plan – expecting it to take time to get everything into place and for members to start adjusting to your new approach – but everything is on schedule and going well.

Then, enter your CEO or another colleague full of new ideas. Usually, these include comparisons to what other credit unions are doing or insights from an article they read with tactics they think should be used in your credit union’s marketing approach. Or maybe you’ve even found new, cool marketing tools in use by your competition.

Sound familiar? It’s an unavoidable challenge. Every day in our technology-driven world it seems some new marketing tool or medium is born. And, it’s our instinct to want to jump on it and utilize its features to help boost marketing results.

 

The Problem with New and Shiny

As easy as it is to go down these rabbit holes and chase the next new thing, it becomes a problem because this cycle is never-ending. It inevitably ends by getting stuck in a rut of always researching new opportunities, meanwhile current member opportunities are passing you by.

It’s tough to stay the course. Just look at the weight loss industry’s “next best thing” with its new diets, pills, exercise equipment and routines born practically every minute. But we know that the key to losing weight is to find the eating plan and exercise routine you enjoy and stick with it. Then, as you feel comfortable, and are managing your weight loss goals, you may feel the desire to slowly add new components to your routine (but only if you can continue to manage them).

This is no different than marketing your credit union. Define your strategy, choose your marketing tools and stay the course. As you become comfortable with your marketing approach and manage it successfully, you can begin to enhance it with new tools.

 

Encouragement to Stay the Course

Keep these words of wisdom in mind when you embark on your strategy and are tempted to veer off course.

  1. New ideas are someone’s job. Publications, whether specific to credit unions or the general marketing industry, must publish new content regularly to maintain readership. These publications will always want to push new ideas and concepts – because that’s their job. You don’t have to get sucked into this hype.

 

  1. There isn’t an end to new ideas arising. New marketing mediums and tools will always be launched. Some will be here tomorrow. Others will die out. For example, social media was touted as the end-all for marketing. Yet most of the “overnight social media experts” that popped up are now gone or have become “digital experts,” expanding their market because social media work solo didn’t work out exactly as they proclaimed.

 

  1. Your competitors feel the same way you do. And they’re likely to fall prey to these new ideas and run with them. Use this to your advantage. Take notice of new mediums they use and see how long they pursue them. If they’re still using them 6 – 12 months later, perhaps it’s worth adding to your toolkit if you feel comfortable doing so.

 

Anytime you start a new marketing approach, it’s important to stay focused. It’s easy to get sidetracked and distracted in an industry that is changing daily. Remember to do what works for you and stick with what you can manage. Once you’re comfortable, enhance your approach with new mediums – but only when you’re ready.

 

Build Your Marketing Framework

At STRATIX, we developed our Member Loyalty System [MLS] to help credit unions stay the course. With a defined strategy and set marketing components, credit union marketers are able to build a framework to deepen member relationships over the long-term. Once they are able to manage the system as a whole, then we dive deeper and begin to enhance specific components. Interested? Let’s Chat.